Forgotten Book - The Little Walls

The Little Walls was published in 1955, and the following year, it won the CWA's Crossed Red Herring Award for the best crime novel of the year. That was the very first time the prize had been awarded. It's now the CWA Gold Dagger. Some of the finest crime novels of the past sixty years have won the Gold Dagger, but a surprising number have fallen far out of sight since then.

The Little Walls is among them, and yet its author is renowned. He was Winston Graham, famous above all for Poldark, which I've never read or watched, but which is undoubtedly very popular. What is more, Graham's crime fiction was also successful - Hitchcock filmed Marnie, for instance, and The Walking Stick also became a movie.

This novel reminded me strongly of the type of thriller Eric Ambler was writing at much the same time. Graham's writing, like Ambler's, is several cuts above the average. He is strong on character and setting and competent with plot, though this isn't a whodunit. Rather, it involves the attempt by Philip Turner to find out the truth about the death of his brother, who apparently committed suicide by jumping into a canal in Amsterdam.

The heart of the book lies in a series of moral dilemmas. Graham contrasts two different types of personality, in effect representing good and evil, and does so in a way that is constantly interesting, even if the pace is occasional less fast than one expects of a thriller. Much of the action takes place in Capri, and he evokes that lovely island's languid nature very well. I can see why this book won the award, and I'm glad I finally caught up with it at last.

Forgotten Book - The Walking Stick

The Walking Stick is a novel written by Winston Graham at the peak of his powers and it's very good news that Bello have reissued it, along with many other of his books. I'd seen the film based on it and made in 1970, starring Samantha Eggar and David Hemmings, and really enjoyed it. The book, published three years earlier, was just as good, and even though it is to some extent of its time, it seems to me to have worn very well, as so many books written by really good storytellers do.

By the time he wrote this book, Graham was a very experienced crime writer. If you compare it to Take My Life, which I blogged about recently, it's got more depth and more subtlety. It's a mark of his confidence that he felt able to write in the first person, as a young woman suffering from a disability (her leg has been badly damaged by polio, hence her need for the titular walking stick) and to do so in a way that carries conviction .Deborah, one of three daughters in a wealthy family, compensates for a sense of insecurity with a rather brusque approach, and the way she rebuffs an attractive young man, Leigh, who evidently fancies her, may seem unlikely to some readers, but I found it credible. In the end, however, she succumbs to his advances.

Leigh, unfortunately, is a bit of a dodgy character. He's an artist - but how good are his paintings? And how reliable are his accounts of his previous life? From the outset, it's clear that there is more to him than meets the eye. Graham's portrayal of Leigh reminded me of Francis Iles' portrayal of Johnnie in Before the Fact, and I did wonder if the earlier book was a slight influence, even thought the plots are very different, and the build-up here is slower than in the Iles classic. Even so, I gulped the story down..

Graham is interested in the moral choices that people make, and through careful character-building, he makes us believe in the choices - both good and bad, wise and foolish - that his narrator makes. Yet there's nothing preachy about this story - it's a straightforward yarn, yet told so fluently that it also makes you think a bit. Not too much, though - first and foremost, Graham was an entertainer. And a very accomplished one too.

Forgotten Book - Take My Life

Winston Graham is well remembered as the author of the Poldark series of historical romances set in Cornwall, but his excellent crime fiction is (with a few exceptions such as Marnie) often overlooked. My Forgotten Book for today is a mystery he published in 1947, which is now available as a Bello ebook. I think Take My Life began life as a screenplay, and this is evident in the visual quality of the story. Certainly, it was filmed, although I've never seen the movie version.

At the time he published this book, Graham had been writing novels for more than a decade, yet overall I think it's fair to say that it still formed part of his literary apprenticeship (and many of my fellow authors may well agree that one's apprenticeship sometimes feels as though it will never end!) I read this book on holiday in the Arctic, immediately before a second Graham novel written twenty years later, and there's no doubt that the later book is superior. I'll say more about that one on this blog before long. But Take My Life is a swift, easy read. He was a very accessible writer.

This is a "race against time" story, one of those where an innocent man faces execution for murder, and the one person who believes in him faces a desperate struggle to try to establish that he did not commit the crime. Everything in Philippa Talbot's life seems rosy. She is a young, pretty and talented singer, who has just returned to London with her new husband Nicholas. But her pleasure in success on the stage is marred when she sees him with a member of the orchestra who - it turns out - is a former lover. They have a row, he leaves the house, and at a time when he has no alibi, the lover is murdered.

So, whodunit? The answer is soon revealed, because Graham is more interested in the clock race than mystery. I have to say that I did not believe the evidence was strong enough to convict a man of murder, and the police's failure to follow up other leads, though perhaps necessary for the plot, was highly unconvincing. These are real flaws, yet it is a tribute to Graham's sheer readability that I raced through the story, keen to find out precisely what had happened, despite my reservations. Not a masterpiece, by a long chalk, but brisk and worthwhile entertainment.

Hunting the Northern Lights

Although the theme of last week's boat trip up the coast of north Norway was "hunting the lights", the first thing for me to say is that my camera and photographic skills proved not to be up to the challenge of capturing the Northern Lights when, finally, I did see them. Though there were plenty of moments during the trip when the quality of light over the coastline before darkness fell was absolutely mesmerising. The above shot was taken as the sun went down over Vardo. Landing there gave an opportunity to fellow passengers more intrepid than me to bathe in the Arctic Ocean - at least for about thirty seconds...

Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose! During that brief stop in Vardo, (safely encased in many layers of warm clothing!) I visited the most northerly fortress in the world. In the twilight it had an especially eerie charm.

Other ports of call included Hammerfest, one of many small towns in Norway which seems to be benefiting from the exploitation of the country's massive natural resources. I was interested in the lifestyle of people who come to this very cold region from warmer countries - some clearly love it, and there is plenty to love, I can see that, even though personally I'd find the total absence of sunlight between late November and late January very hard to take.

The quality of the light on snowy mountains and sea just below Hammerfest was magical - my photos really don't do it justice. As for the Northern Lights, there were two cloudy and blank nights before the first message came that they were visible. I'd been surprised to learn that many Norwegians, even, have never seen with the naked eye the green lights that are often portrayed in dramatic photographs, and I didn't either, though a charming fellow traveller - a Turkish brain surgeon, yes, it's a cosmopolitan world up there - has captured them in a photograph as stunning as any you see in the books and I[m planning to retweet it..

My own first sighting of the Northern Lights was truly memorable - out on deck in an Arctic gale so powerful it was almost impossible to stand - but there were the legendary lights, a pinkish red glow. Later that evening, there were two further displays - more elaborate and longer-lasting this time, strange shapes in the sky of a ghostly white hue. All in all, it was a remarkable experience. It was only a short break, but I've never had a holiday like this one. I much prefer to be warm rather than cold but I'm really very glad I returned to this fantastic country.

And there's one bonus of life in that part of the world, when it gets dark early. You have plenty of time to read, and I rattled through a number of enjoyable books, by authors as diverse as John Buxton Hilton, Joyce Porter, Winston Graham, and Margaret Millar. I'll be featuring all of them in this blog before long.

Winston Graham

In the 1970s, the hugely popular television series ‘Poldark’ made Winston Graham’s name very well known. I never got into ‘Poldark’, a historical saga set in Cornwall (even though I thought Angharad Rees, one of the stars, was truly lovely) and I was never tempted to read the books. Not until some years later did I discover that, before he turned to swashbucklers, Graham was a highly accomplished writer of crime fiction.

Successful, too. He wrote the book on which Hitchcock based that interesting movie ‘Marnie’, starring Sean Connery, and also the story that sourced ‘The Walking Stick’, a quirky thriller boasting another starry cast that included the late David Hemmings, Samantha Eggar and Francesca Annis. I rather like both films.

And there is more. Winston Graham was the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1955, for The Little Walls. (In fact, in those days, the award rejoiced in the name of the Crossed Red Herrings Award. It changes name from time to time, having recently been the Duncan Lawrie Dagger an expediency to reflect the short-lived sponsorship of a bank, but the Dagger name changes are irritating; to my mind the Gold Dagger is the right title for the award for best crime novel of the year.)

So I decided it was high time to read a bit of Winston Graham. And thanks to eBay, I now have a decent and modestly priced haul of his paperbacks.